The patent office is about to make bad patents untouchable

Lamenting that everything is about AI, seems to be the thing of today.

Patent trolls hurt tech so thats now a good thing on new HN (now filled with normies like most tech companies these days). The enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.

Nobody has any real values or beliefs anymore. We’re all just swimming in vibes.

> Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?

It is much easier to get a patent than it is to use that patent successfully in legal proceedings. The bar that you have to clear to get it through the USPTO has never been particularly high.

So this is kinda, if you squint at it a little, just writing down what the status quo already is.

(As sibling mentions - if it did work, of course it's way cheaper to nip it in the bud earlier. You just can't really guarantee that you'll get enough expert eyes to get a reasonable decision out of the USPTO)

I would have to ask more to be able to explain more, but that's how things have been explained to me growing up.

Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.

In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.

On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.

From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.

"everything is so bad it's hopeless" or smth?

There are large corporations (IBM, Qualcomm, Nokia, etc...) lobbying Congress and the Senate to restore software patents via the PERA bill, while the lobbying from small and medium software companies is very low.

Patents are a way to make sure inventors are getting compensated for their R&D work and risk.

I do agree with your observation though - IMHO, the "exclusivity" period of a patent should last five years, and for the 15 years after that, patent holders should be mandated to license out their patent at reasonable pricing.

- measuring how well a patent office works by how many patents they grant (their purpose is to reject bad patents, it's 100% the opposite of the metrics often used)

- a standard where patents are often written with the most obtuse complex language as multi layered onions, instead of clear straight forward language

- no relevant consequences for most companies systematically deceiving the patent office about what they actually try to patent using artificial complex language, systematically fail to do the research into prior art and "happen" to overlook all prior art all the time

- patents require a certain level of innovation _in the aspects they patent_, but in practice patent offices rarely do enforce this. A solution anyone can trivially find if they run into similar "normal" problems isn't innovation. The abstract concept of applying a concept from IRL onto games (or similar) isn't innovation. A minor tweak(1) or trivial re-combinations of existing patents isn't innovation either. etc. etc.

- the patent office tends to be severely under-stocked, especially in context of AI making it easier to mass generate nonsense patents and non-clear-straight-forward language being the norm

- allowing people to not (relevantly) use their patent and still sue others for using it (which is directly harming innovation and really shouldn't be allowed)

- allowing absurd prices for usage permissions of patents (outside of certain especially fundamental/core patents, forgot how they are called), everyone should be able to buy _any_ patents usage right for a _reasonable_ price. Patents are for making sure companies doing innovation can re-coupe their investments, not for preventing marked competition and enforcing quasi-monopolies

(1): Like a minor tweak which doesn't require tons of research, don't make a fundamental difference etc. Like think

99% of modern software is complete shit, deserves no "my idea" protection, and will definitely not get any better with a higher barrier to competition. The real innovation these days is to make software that is usable, performant, and actually fucking works - and barely any company has the motivation and technical capability to achieve that. And when they do, as rare as that is, that simply cannot be copied.